At the heart of Sam Kean's book is a refreshing idea: to tell the story of the periodic table almost entirely in terms of material oddity, instructive folly, elemental greed and partisan obsession.

The field is large, one might say universal. Some of the stories have already been told many times (no historian, however eccentric, could omit Mendeleev or Rutherford or Pierre and Marie Curie) but Kean searches for stuff of rarer substance. Naturally, he goes (or rather, does not: the notes suggest that a friend in pursuit of another book about the elements sent him photographs) to Ytterby, that little Swedish settlement on a feldspar quarry that gave its name to four rare earths (ytterbium, yttrium, terbium and erbium, for pub quiz fiends). Then there's holmium from Stockholm, thulium from Thule, and gadolinium, after the industrious Finnish element hunter Johan Gadolin.

The theme of each chapter – politics, money, war, the arts, health, toxins, radiation and so on – is prescribed by groups of elements in the periodic table and the things they tell us about the nature of matter; about the stardust origins of the elements; about the compounds they make and why some elements are more reactive than others; and why the table falls into a pattern so obvious (to a few) that its begetters were able to predict the characteristics of elements not yet identified. The pace is enthusiastic, the tone and language are pitched at the young or the non-chemical and the examples are pleasingly unexpected.

Did you know that the longest word in the language (1,185 letters) describes a protein of the tobacco mosaic virus? Or that the mix of antimony pentafluoride and hydrofluoric acid yields a superacid that is "100,000 billion billion billion times more potent than stomach acid and will eat through glass, as ruthlessly as water through paper"? On the same page we learn that Newton was obsessed with the sexual properties of antimony, that Mozart probably died from taking too much of the stuff to combat a severe fever, and that boron-based carborane is simultaneously "the world's strongest and gentlest acid".

Stories about one element seamlessly lead to another: from the gold and ruthenium in Parker 51 fountain pen nibs to Mark Twain's Remington typewriter, and thence to Twain's 1904 short story about Satan, who is made of radium, but who insulates his own heat with a polonium suit, with the consequence that, says Satan "I burn. I suffer within!" Polonium would never have withheld the heat of a critical mass of radium, Kean warns, before racing on to lithium, and the black moods of the poet Robert Lowell.

Gallium, which sits next to aluminium in the periodic table, melts at very low temperatures: Kean's title takes its name from a laboratory prank involving a teaspoon made of gallium that vanishes when dipped into a cup of hot tea. We then learn that the melting point of metals created problems for artillerymen who wanted to lob ever bigger shells at the enemy, which leads to an instructive story about the Portuguese dictator Salazar and the way he sold tungsten to both sides during the second world war.

Tungsten is one of the hardest of all metals: a tungsten-tipped kinetic energy projectile can tear through a tank. The story of steel-strengthening alloys begins with Big Bertha, the Kaiser's super siege gun that could throw a ton of explosives over a range of nine miles. But the heat of the discharge was enough to scorch and warp the 20-foot barrel, so the steel had to be reinforced with molybdenum. The two pages that contain this lesson also allude to Fritz Haber, gas warfare, the steel firm Krupp, a master swordmaker of 14th century Japan, and some dark dealing at an abandoned molybdenum mine in Colorado.

Every now and then, the strain of such hectic storytelling shows. A paragraph in the two pages mentioned above (to take an example immediately to hand) opens with the sentence "In addition to Haber's being a Jew, Germany excommunicated him because he had become passé." That sentence has so many things wrong with it that I don't know where to start. In the same paragraph, we hear of a battle "against Lawrence of Arabia on the Sahara sands". One would have thought the qualification "of Arabia" offered a clue to Lawrence's coordinates.

I might not have mentioned these things at all except that in an appendix to this headlong book Kean offers an interview with himself, in which he addresses the question: "How did you hone your writing skills?"